Anthology, Expedition, and Travelogue Down Memory Lanes and Memory Holes

Monday, May 9, 2011

Document of the Week #15 CIA Report on Terrorist Attacks on American Business Abroad

In the hubbub spawned by the successful whacking of Osama Bin Laden, I totally forgot to post a Document of the Week. By the time I remembered to do so, it was already Thursday and I simply decided to shelve it until next week.

This Document of the Week is a June 1982 CIA report on terrorist attacks against American businesses aboard between January 1968 through December 1981. Twenty pages in length, the report includes several interesting graphs and numerous factoids that challenge the post-9/11 narrative that terrorism was unknown to the United States and its American inhabitants.

In the 14-year span covered by the report, the CIA noted there almost a thousand terrorist attacks against American business interests by foreign terrorists. Of the 953 attacks carried out by 98 different foreign terrorist organizations against American businesses, 144 of them caused casualties. The number of attacks increased from 1968 until they peaked in 1974 when they began a decline that was interrupted by an uptick in 1978 due to the events in Iran. During this time period, Argentina was the site of the most attacks against American businesses keeping with Latin America being the geographic location of the most attacks Argentinian terrorist organization Montoneros was the group responsible for the most terrorist attacks against American interests in the time period covered by the report. The Western Europe and the Middle East were each the locations of 18% of the total attacks followed by the North America (which includes the United States saw 16% of the total attacks.

This report does have some noticeable errors. A while back, I posted a similar CIA focused on skyjackings of American aircraft, which listed attacks by Croatian and Serbian nationalists groups opposed to the former Yugoslavia. This report lists and mentions those acts (calling them skyjackings) but fails to list the groups responsible for them.